There are 10,000 AI agents. Nobody knows which ones they actually need. Build vs buy is just the first question. Run your use cases through this 3 step decision tree: 1. Is it generic or unique to your company? - Generic: a standard function every company does the same way. Support inbox, meeting notes, invoices. Buy a vertical agent. - Unique: it runs on your expertise and playbooks. The stuff no vendor has. Build, or configure a horizontal agent. 2. One-off or recurring? - One-off: analytics deep dive, some landing pages, a research report. Buy and configure a personal agent. No need to build from scratch with an agent framework or SDK. Grok Bot is getting crazy good. Integrations are easy. I spun up a half decent marketing analytics agent in an hour. The missing piece is evals. But if it's just for one project, and you're the human in the loop, you're fine. - Recurring: it runs every week, every deal, every client. Build it. 3. How much does a human touch it? The less human in the loop, and the more complex the work, the more engineering you need. Human babysits everything, internal, low stakes, handles basic tasks? Nontechnical person can vibe code it. E.x.: marketing dashboard, lead enrichment script, content repurposing workflow. Little or no human, your playbook and expertise at scale, customer facing, handling a large body of complex work? You need AI engineers. E.x.: healthcare customer support agent, background agents that work while you sleep, custom web apps non-technical teams use all day.